Archive for May, 2010

Le Whif is BREATHABLE chocolate!!! All of the taste, none of the calories. Each colorful tube of Le Whif gives you up to 10 puffs of chocolately flavor: chocolate, chocolate-raspberry or mint chocolate. It actually doesn’t enter the lungs, but delivers a rich chocolate taste sensation to the tongue and sides of the mouth. And now Le Whif has developed coffee hits…for that caffeine jolt on the go!

Over 10 years ago, Kyla said to me “I think vending machines will sell luxury/high tech items, even artwork and be in places like night clubs, hotels, airports”. This is why she’s my business partner…she’s brilliant. Check out the gold brick vending machine…or shall we say “automated retail experience”! According to an article in the New York Times last week, “Vending machines in neon-splashed Tokyo have electronic eyes that evaluate consumers’ skin and wrinkles to determine whether they are old enough to buy tobacco. In bathrooms at upscale Canadian bars, vending machines with flat irons enable women to defrizz their locks. In Abu Dhabi, the lobby of a luxury hotel has a vending machine that dispenses gold bars and coins at more than $1000 an ounce.” When you can get an iPad from a vending machine, it makes a Baby Ruth seem so pedestrian!!!

While facebook may be able to achieve things great and small — whether it is reinvigorating the career of an 88-year-old actress, or simply reconnecting two old friends ­– I have been boycotting the social networking site since it started. One of my initial objections to the service was the rumor that users personal information would be sold to other companies for data mining.

More recently I’ve heard about various facebook problems — constantly changing and ever confusing privacy policies, as well as a glitch a few weeks ago that temporarily made members’ private chats visible to all of their friend — leaving many users nervous about the privacy of their information.

So I wasn’t that surprised to learn that a group of college students are receiving a great deal of attention (and start-up money) based on their concept of a social networking site that respects and maintains the privacy of its users. They plan to launch their social networking framework, diaspora*, in September 2010.

I admit it. When doing somewhat rote work related things, I like to have the TV on…But no TV at the office, so all of that rote work used to happen at home (usually late at night or on weekends). With the iPad and NetFlix, I can now stream various TV shows and have that on at the office. TV at work…yep, makes the rote stuff go faster and I don’t have to work weekends. Whew!!!

According to Richard Florida, 60% of Americans say they want to live in walkable communities. He tags this as part of a New Urbanism. Is walking part of the culture of your community? For recreation? For commerce?

According to CNN, we spend approximately 60 hours a year on hold. Ughh.. Welcome Lucyphone, she does the holding for you. Genius. Check out their site for more information: www.lucyphone.com Oh, and it is free!

Call me crazy but I think that conspicuous consumption will once again finds its place in the American consumer-scape. While we all privately meditate on our personal definition of value, some high lux brands are still churning a profit, even in these lean times. Vertu Phones, a division of Nokia, specializes in phones in the range of $5,000 – $325,000. Made of sinful materials like gold, platinum, leather or even pave diamonds, Vertu believes that the phone is replacing the watch as the badge luxury product. So, if your Rolex is feeling yesterday, get yourself a Vertu in ostrich skin. It will be a conversation piece, no matter how you look at it!

A new study by researchers in the UK and Italy suggests that abnormal sleeping pattern may result in an increased risk of premature death. (The research took data from Europe, the US and Asia over the past 25 years, covering more than a million people and over 100,000 deaths.)

There were two key findings from the research as reported by The Guardian in the UK.

1. Those who sleep for less than six hours a night were 12% more likely to experience a premature death than those who got six to eight hours’ sleep – the ideal amount.

2. Those who consistently sleep more than nine hours a night are possibly more likely to die early. (Basically, oversleeping is not a risk but a potential indicator of underlying ailments!)

This may be old news to photography aficios, but it’s news to me! You press the shutter button and just sweep the camera laterally and it takes the images automatically and stitches them together in a about a second for a super-wide panorama shot. Sony TX7 Cybershot! (I can’t remember the last time I used the “Sony” in conjunction with an exclamation mark.)